The Public Option In Obama's Platform

"I didn't campaign on the public option," President Obama told The Washington Post in an interview in the Oval Office, when asked about criticism of the health care plan being shepherded through the Senate this week--a plan that has drawn fire from liberals for not including the type of government-run insurance plan that Obama pushed for repeatedly in 2009.

"Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill," Obama said.

Liberals have disputed the claim today, citing the official Obama-Biden health care platform, available here in .pdf thanks to Ezra Klein's Google skills (Klein posted a comparison of the current plan and the platform a few days ago).

So who is right?

The public option was not a focal point of the 2008 campaign. Obama's
disputes with Hillary Clinton focused on the individual mandate; his
prime spat with McCain was over whether to tax employees' health
benefits. Despite its prominence in '09, and Obama's public efforts to
create one, the public option didn't get mentioned very often in 2008.

The
Obama-Biden platform clearly does include mentions of a new public
health insurance plan, but it is by no means trumpeted as a central
facet of reform.

The document is 7 1/2 single-spaced pages (plus
citations at the end), and the public option doesn't even get its own
bullet point. It's never the lone subject or object of a declarative
sentence. Given the public option's prominence this year, it's actually
surprising to read the document and see it referenced so passingly.

Here are the only points at which the public option is mentioned (references bolded by me):

Providers who see patients enrolled in the new public plan,
the National Health Insurance Exchange, Medicare and FEHB will be
rewarded for achieving performance thresholds on physician-validated
outcome measures.

The Obama-Biden plan
provides new affordable health insurance options by: (1) guaranteeing
eligibility for all health insurance plans; (2) creating a National
Health Insurance Exchange to help Americans and businesses purchase
private health insurance; (3) providing new tax credits to families who
can't afford health insurance and to small businesses with a new Small
Business Health Tax Credit; (4) requiring all large employers to
contribute towards health coverage for their employees or towards the
cost of the public plan; (5) requiring all children have health
care coverage; (5) expanding eligibility for the Medicaid and SCHIP
programs; and (6) allowing flexibility for state health reform plans.

Through the Exchange, any American will have the opportunity to enroll in the new public plan
or an approved private plan, and income-based sliding scale tax credits
will be provided for people and families who need it. Insurers would
have to issue every applicant a policy and charge fair and stable
premiums that will not depend upon health status. The Exchange will
require that all the plans offered are at least as generous as the new
public plan and meet the same standards for quality and efficiency.

This is an explanation of insurance exchanges, but sounds like an articulation of what the public plan will entail:

The Exchange will have the following features:

Comprehensive
benefits. The benefit package will be similar to that offered through
the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), the program
through which Members of Congress get their own health care. Plans will
include coverage of all essential medical services, including
preventive, maternity and mental health care.

Barack
Obama and Joe Biden will ensure that all Americans are empowered to
monitor their health by ensuring coverage of essential clinical
services in all federally supported health plans, including Medicare,
Medicaid, SCHIP and the new public plan.

Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher finds
this video (below) of Obama telling Planned Parenthood that
"essentially what we're doing is to say that we're going to set up a
public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don't
have health insurance."

Salon's Alex Koppelman notes
that a Lexis-Nexis search for "Barack Obama" and "public option" yields
only 46 results between Jan. 1, 2008 and Oct. 31, 2008. Sam Stein has
a rundown of news clips and concludes that candidate Obama spoke
"remarkably infrequently" about the need to create a government-run
plan.

So it comes down, in essence, to how one interprets the verb "campaign"--a discussion that Political Animal's Steve Benen calls "annoying." And annoying it may be, but it's important.

Obama didn't campaign on the public option too actively. He didn't talk
about it much, and it wasn't a prominent part of his campaign's health
care platform--at all. He did support it, and he did include it in his
platform, albeit in a back-bench way.